Welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly productivity, mini painting and accountability blog. You’ll notice I moved the order of those phrases around this week, as I’ve been saying the same thing every week for four years and three months, and variety is sometimes needed to stop us from going mad.
Anyway, this week I painted black. Let’s see if I went mad.
SCORECARD
The only thing not black this week is the scorecard, which is completely green. With the raider counting as ten points, in fact, we’re double in the green, making up for last week’s measly two points.
Next week is week 10 of 13, and the models for the quarter will be done by then. I really can’t see a world in which I don’t get Drazzar done with a full week to himself.
Since I will be done then, I think I will take the chance to get into the studio early, and get the next quarterly review done by week 11, ready to be published for week 13.
The target for next quarter is starting to become fairly obvious, since I need an 11th edition army to lose to Jim’s rapidly growing Custodes army.
Despite getting everything done on time, it wasn’t completely plain sailing this week. The raider is a fantastic model, and I am genuinely proud of how well it has turned out, especially considering how badly beaten up and broken it was. In fact, you’ll remember that I had, at multiple points, considered making it a piece of crashed vehicle scenery.
However, it was a lot of hard black edges to paint in a week. I nearly lost my reason at the mechanicus standard grey section a couple of times!
THIS WEEK’S MODEL
This week’s model is my original 1998 Dark Eldar raider. This thing has followed me around in boxes, getting increasingly battered and abused (fitting for Dark Eldar?) for nearly 28 years.
Amazingly, it seems like I never threw a broken piece away, so after a solid amount of rummaging, I managed to pretty much completely put it back together. I think you would have to be super familiar with the kit to be able to tell what had been broken and repaired over the years, but it is possible.
The majority of this week was painting two shades of black. The model uses a blue black of Dark Reaper, Thunderhawk Blue and Fenresian Grey for the decorative or additional armour panels and spikes and a neutral grey of Mechanicus Standard Grey, Dawnstone and Administratum Grey for the general body work.
I wanted the blue grey to be the detail colour, basically, while the neutral grey was the basic structure.
All of this edge highlighting too ages. I forgot how tricky black could be after years of painting Black Legion.
I even painted the underside, although I will be honest and admit I was a lot less careful and a lot more drybrushy.
I used the red spot colour on the helmets and seats, the white on the hair and the green on the various lenses and screens.
I included a decent amount of metallics because I half remember reading somewhere that unlike Craftworld Eldar, most of the Dark Eldar technology is “mundane” rather than semi-magical space plastic.
WHAT’S NEXT
With the raider done, the core Dark Eldar Army is done. Well, “army” might be a stretch. Here is the collection as it stands. It is currently not a legal army in 3rd edition since it only has a singel troop choice. And it is quite a small force at about 600 ish points.
A few small additions would bring it up to a 1,000 battle legal army for 3rd edition. Firstly, adding a second troop squad of 10 warriors in a second raider.
Then building the wyches up to 10 and also giving them a raider.
Finally, promoting the Dracon to an Archon. This would give an army with a troops squad to hang back on objectives, a super fast, horribly hard to kill wych squad to tie up the enemies heavy hitters, or eat their weaker troops and a killer power weapon equipped Incubi squad zooming around in a raider with a shadowfield Archon. And finally the scourges deep-striking in and taking pot shots from the back line.
HAMMER THE FRONTLOG
Jim is back from holidays and back at it. He powered through the second set of three Alarus terminators in record time.
He now has a fully functioning, 1,000 point 11th edition army. There are many lifelong warhammerers who can’t say that.
Since the Custodes don’t come with alternative poses, Jim has now entered the world of basic kitbashing.
They grow up so fast.
That’s it for another week! See you next week for the finished Dark Eldar collection!
Best of eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
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